The 6 Greatest Acts of Trolling in the History of Science

Science, we assume, involves stuffed-shirt intellectuals engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge and discovery. And we tend to think of "trolls" as basement-dwelling hate machines who enjoy antagonistic lunacy as its own reward. You would think there wouldn't be much overlap between these two groups. You would be wrong.

Science has seen some epic trolling over the years, so much so that it at times makes 4chan look like a chamber of reasoned discourse.

#6. Johann Beringer Gets Trolled by Fake Fossils

In the early 18th century, giant-ass dinosaur bones and other fossils were being dug up all over the place, but people had no idea where the hell they came from. Religion still had a firm grip on the scientific community, so the notion that the fossils could belong to a species of animal that had since become extinct was rejected by many, and even considered blasphemous, since God would never allow any of his creations to simply die out. Some people even argued that God had buried the bones himself to test their faith, because rationality occasionally hangs by a very fine thread.

Getty"What an odd shape the sand sometimes takes, huh?"

A particularly vocal supporter of this theory was Johann Beringer, the head of the natural history department of the University of Wurzburg in Germany. He was firmly convinced that all fossils were "hidden by the Author of Nature for his own pleasure," although a fair elaboration of what that "pleasure" might have been was never fully provided. And honestly, we don't understand why someone so devoutly religious would be so firmly adherent to the idea that God threw a bunch of bones down to Earth just to screw with people, because it sure makes the Almighty sound like a giant douchemungus.

Anyway, two colleagues of Beringer, J. Ignatz Roderick and Georg von Eckhart, decided they actually would carve strange fake fossils and bury them to screw with Beringer. Instead of calling bullshit the second he saw the obvious (we cannot stress that word enough) forgeries, Beringer couldn't believe his luck. Figuring he had won the fossil lottery (that's a thing, right?), he scooped them up and tossed them into his fossil sack (that's a thing, right?) to carry them home for further analysis. Heartened by this (a phrase here meaning "laughing their scientific dicks off"), Roderick and Eckhart made even more fossils for Beringer to find. These new ones were engraved with Syrian, Hebrew, and Babylonian inscriptions, including one engraved with the word "Jehovah," the Hebrew name for God.

Photos.com"There's another one over here!"

Astonishingly, Beringer ate the whole thing up. He published a book cataloging his amazing finds in which he actually wrote that the fossils were "so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor." Even when Roderick and Eckhart tried to tell him they'd tricked him (their sides having been sufficiently split by joyous guffaws), he refused to believe them. Instead, Beringer accused them of trying to shake his faith and block the publication of his work.

It wasn't until after publishing his Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, when Beringer found yet another miraculous fossil with his own goddamn name on it, that he finally accepted that he'd been bamboozled. He spent the next few years in a legal battle with Roderick and Eckhart (who, in their defense, had tried to tell him), while simultaneously trying to buy up all the copies of his book to save his reputation. Bizarrely, it was Eckhart and Roderick who were disgraced for perpetrating the hoax, while Beringer kept his job and wrote several more books despite being a demonstrably terrible scientist.

These are some of the actual stones, displayed at Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands.

#5. Electricity Turns Everyone into Trolls

Before the 18th century, we had a tough time wrapping our minds around electricity (things like lightning were best described as "Zeus' space magic" and went no further than that). However, once electricity was better understood and batteries were finally constructed in the form of Leyden jars, one of the first practical applications people discovered for this newly harnessed energy was using it to shock the balls out of each other.

One of electricity's inaugural trollings was accomplished by Jean-Antoine Nollet, who had the Royal Guards of Louis XV line up while holding a length of wire between them for a demonstration to the royal court of France (the word "demonstration" here meaning "he electro-blasted the urine from their bladders"). Later, he repeated the "experiment" with 200 French monks, who lined up just like the Royal Guards and had their vows of silence zapped out of them. In neither case did he bother to explain to his volunteers what exactly he was about to do to them, presumably leaving it at "Stand here and hold this. Get ready for science."

Not to be outdone by the French, German physicist George Bose hosted parties where he would rig a beautiful young girl with a charge and then invite men to kiss her, giving them a shock that almost "knocked their teeth out." This setup apparently worked often enough, despite easily being the most suspicious thing of all time.

Evidently they were too blinded by boner fatigue to notice him hand-cranking an alternator.

Benjamin Franklin eventually got involved, because back then there was pretty much nothing that escaped his attention. Franklin focused on how electricity could be used for the betterment of society, which is another way of saying "the betterment of Ben Franklin's afternoons." One of his first antics was to electrify his front gate, presumably to confuse and terrify neighborhood children while he watched from the foyer and laughed his ass off. He then proceeded to electrify everything in his house, including metal spiders (for some reason), floor panels, and the wine glasses of dinner guests, burning their lips with white-hot electricity if they tried to take a sip. He even rigged the crown on a portrait of King George to give anyone touching it a "high-treason shock," because hijinks are the apogee of science.

His enthusiasm spread to fellow Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, who purchased a small Leyden jar that he could hide in his pocket to shock anyone who touched him, because apparently the impending revolution wasn't quite enough to occupy these gentlemen's time.

#4. Sir Richard Owen Trolls His Rival's Death

Sure, Sir Richard Owen once got into a bitter flame war with Charles Darwin that seriously devalued the discussion of evolution as a legitimate theory and brought about his own professional ruin. But that's not what makes him one of the greatest trolls science has ever seen.

Sir Richard Owen was a scientist who pioneered the field of paleontology by plagiarizing the work of a colleague named Gideon Mantell, then used his clout to crush Mantell, leaving the man to die poor, crippled, and unrecognized. And after Mantell was dead, Owen only stepped up his campaign.

Holy shit, that's Scrooge!

First, Mantell's obituary was written by Owen himself (under a pseudonym) and predictably boiled down to "Ha ha, look at this dead asshole." Then, Mantell's spine was placed in a museum for scientific study. He had badly broken his back years earlier in a carriage accident, and his lower vertebrae had twisted and fused back into place in a manner that can only be described as "tit-blastingly wrong." And who should be in charge of the museum that took control of Mantell's mutant spinal column? None other than Sir Richard "I shit on your grave" Owen, who immediately seized this opportunity to skip the rope of dickitry across Mantell's already belittled legacy.

After stealing Mantell's life's work and diminishing his career to the level of "sparse Wikipedia entry," Owen took the spine and had it pickled in a jar to demonstrate "the severest degree of deformity," where it was placed on display alongside other "monstrosities," presumably on a shelf labeled "TROLLOLOLOL."

"This is nothing compared to the size of the bone I gave your mother. I fucking dare you to haunt me."

Owen died in 1892, but as one final "kiss my ass" from beyond the grave, Mantell's spine was unceremoniously tossed in the garbage in the 1970s when the museum cleared out a bunch of old bullshit that nobody cared about anymore.